Hasn’t Orv had good luck with his motor? [she continued] I am afraid that your health as well as your motor is interfering with your doing your best. You are doing well enough, but we know that you would have made an hour long’s flight long ago if you had had as good a chance as Orv. Since you didn’t, I am glad Orv did just what he did—to shut up the ever-lasting knockers. We hope every day that we will see that you have made a record. We know that there is some reason for it when you don’t and that makes us uneasy about your health. Those burns were so much more serious than we thought for a long time. That has pulled you down, I have no doubt. You look mighty thin in all the pictures.
She had made up her mind that the Bishop should go to Washington to see Orville fly. She would go, too, but there was not money enough for both to make the trip.
“Do you suppose we could scratch up the cash? Daddy has about a hundred dollars.”
The Bishop liked to preach the futility of craving fame. “Enjoy fame ere its decadence, for I have realized the emptiness of its trumpet blasts,” he had written to Wilbur, and quoted favorite lines from the Irish poet Thomas Moore:
And false the light on glory’s plume
As fading lines of even.
But for all that he was as eager as the thousands in Washington to see Orville in action. “He wants to go alright,” Katharine wrote.
That same Sunday, September 13, on the other side of the Atlantic, Wilbur wrote to tell Orville the sensation he, Orville, was in Europe. “The newspapers for several days have been full of stories of your dandy flights, and whereas a week ago, I was a marvel of skill, now they do not hesitate to tell me I am nothing but a ‘dub,’ and that you are the only genuine sky scraper. Such is fame.”
Wilbur’s longest time in the air at Camp d’Auvours thus far was just over 21 minutes, and only the week before, Léon Delagrange had made the longest flight ever in Europe, staying in the air slightly less than half an hour.
He was having motor troubles, Wilbur explained, and the weather had been “something fierce.” To Katharine he reported he had had almost as many congratulations on Orville’s success as he himself had had a month earlier.
But in a letter to his father, also written that same Sunday, Wilbur confided the real trouble was the constant fuss being made over him. It had become more than he could take. Everyone seemed a genuine friend and looked upon him as an adopted citizen of France. Nearly every evening two or three thousand people came out to see if he would fly and went home disappointed if he did not. One old man of seventy who lived thirty miles away made the round-trip on a bicycle almost every day for a week.
The excitement and the worry, and above all the fatigue of an endless crowd of visitors from daylight till dark had brought me to such a point of nervous exhaustion that I did not feel myself really fit to get on the machine. . . . I can’t stand it to have people continually watching me. It gets on my nerves.
As he explained to Katharine, he carried on his correspondence sitting in his shed, the door locked to keep people out.
Close to midnight in Washington, from the privacy of his room at the Cosmos Club, Orville wrote to Wilbur that he had never felt so rushed in his life, and that he had a stack of unanswered letters a foot high. To Katharine he wrote that the weather, being what it was, would probably take another few days to “quiet down.” In any event, he added, “I do not think I will make any more practice flights.”
In his brief time thus far at Fort Myer, Orville had set seven world records.
Rumors in Washington and in an article in the New York Times on September 15 saying that President Roosevelt would soon announce his intention of going up in the plane with Orville provided still more excitement. To many it seemed perfectly in keeping with a president so “given to the espousal of the unusual.” Two years before he had startled the country by diving beneath the waters of Long Island Sound in a submarine.
“Of course, if the President asks me to take him on a flight, I cannot refuse,” Orville said when reporters questioned him. However, he was not enthusiastic about the idea. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t believe the President of the United States should take such chances.”
II.
On Thursday, September 17, the day was clear and cool, wind conditions were ideal. The crowd by the time Orville was ready to take off numbered more than 2,600. Expectations were higher than ever.
A young army officer had been assigned, at his own request, to go with Orville as a passenger, as two other officers had already done and to which Orville had had no objections. This time, however, the young man was someone Orville did not like or trust.
Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate from San Francisco with two eminent military figures in his family background with the same name, a grandfather and great-uncle, both rear admirals. The great-uncle Thomas Selfridge had been the naval officer assigned in 1870 to survey the isthmus of Central America to determine the place to cut a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In little time Lieutenant Selfridge had become one of the army’s most knowledgeable and enthusiastic aviation specialists. He was tall, handsome, and personable and had been made a member of the Signal Corps Aeronautical Board. In addition, he was a member of what was known as the Aerial Experiment Association, or AEA, founded and headed by Alexander Graham Bell, in the interest of progress in the design of flying machines, and that in particular troubled Orville. The young man had a good education and a clear mind, Orville had told Wilbur in a letter, but he was almost certainly a spy for Bell and others of the AEA. “I don’t trust him an inch.”
“Selfridge is endeavoring to do us all the damage he can behind my back, but he makes a pretense of great friendliness,” Orville told his father. The thought of someone like that seated beside him in the air was not easy to accept.
Selfridge also weighed 175 pounds, more than anyone Orville had yet taken up. Still, as a member of the appraisal board, Selfridge was clearly entitled to a flight, and so Orville had agreed.
Looking extremely happy, Selfridge removed his coat and campaign hat, handed them to a friend, and took his place next to Orville, who was attired in his customary dark suit, starched collar, black tie, and Scottish plaid cap.
Charlie Taylor and Charlie Furnas turned the propellers to get them going and at 5:14, the plane headed down the track and lifted more slowly than usual, it seemed to those watching. For 30 to 50 feet it was barely above the grass before it began to “creep” into the air.